Monday, October 08, 2007

Anti-semitic neospeak

I was wondering the other day about the term "neoconservative" and how it's used widely today as a pejorative term for, well, pretty much anyone who's the least bit hawkish and/or pro-Israel. It's the pro-Israel-hawk-as-neocon part that bugged me.

I sometimes read articles and opinion columns in Arab News, and it occurred to me that I see the term neocon thrown around there an awful lot. So I decided to conduct a little experiment.

I pulled up arabnews.com, and did a search on "neocon". I then browsed the returned articles at random, and found that if I substituted the term "neocon" for "Zionist" or "Jew", the article still made perfect sense, in a highly anti-Semitic sort of way.

These are strange and frightening times! It seems to be that human life is being devalued by those with influence and power and what's worse their message that mass death and destruction is somehow acceptable to achieve an end-goal is seeping into the psyches of ordinary people.

On Sunday, the controversial former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told delegates attending the British Conservative Party's annual conference that in his view Iran's nuclear facilities should be bombed and regime-change effected.

Coming out of the mouth of such an abrasive, neoconservative Zionist that sentiment is hardly surprising. What is shocking, however, is the fact he was cheered and not jeered.

The relentless public invective against Muslims and Islamism is also clearly fueled by a political agenda, which seeks to demonstrate that jihadist violence is driven, as Tony Blair and the US neoconservatives Zionists always insisted, by a socially disconnected ideology rather than decades of Western invasion, occupation and support for dictatorships across the Muslim world. That is certainly the view of Richard Watson, the reporter behind Newsnight’s Muslim coverage, who recently wrote that extreme Islamism and terror are the product of a “seductive cult”, not Western foreign policy, and demanded that British Muslims find new leaders. And the co-author of the think tank report which formed the basis of Newsnight’s program on Islamist books in Tower Hamlets libraries is the self-proclaimed neocon Zionist Douglas Murray.

Back in December, readers may recall, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group appointed by Congress recommended a phased withdrawal. President Bush decided to ignore their advice and opted instead for an increase in troops which became known as the surge. Up to now, little has been heard about where the surge idea came from. But according to a report in the National Examiner last week, it was not dreamed up by the Bush administration. It came from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the leading neocon Zionist think tank, which is warmly regarded by Bush.